Roots in Fiction and Philology: George Eliot, Ernest Renan, and Willed Ethnonationalism

Abstract

Abstract: Scholarship on George Eliot’s 1860s Condition-of-England novel Felix Holt has been divided on whether it signals the racist nativism of its decade or advocates for inclusive, willed national belonging. This paper proposes that it accomplishes both, promoting what I call “willed ethnonationalism.” A counterintuitive phrase, willed ethnonationalism captures how Eliot’s novel both defines the nation-form against race belonging and encourages modern nationals to perform racial self-identification. I argue that this stance emerged from Eliot’s engagement with Ernest Renan’s philological career. Recalling how theories of racial-linguistic inheritance influenced a zeitgeist of thinking around constructed nations (epitomized by Renan’s 1882 essay on nationalism), I show how mythic ideas about racial roots informed the ostensibly rational form of the nation-state as expressed in late nineteenth-century fiction and essayistic prose.